When Intel returned to the discrete graphics card market last year, it promised that the Arc GPU drivers would improve over time. And true to their word, regular updates have significantly improved frame rates for older games. However, nothing will go beyond what is claimed in the latest set of beta drivers.

The new version of the Alchemist driver released yesterday is said to provide up to 54% performance improvement at 1080p Returnal with "epic" ray tracing enabled. That's a healthy boost, and it's not the only game where the coding magic wand has been waved: players of "Guild Wars 2" may see a 53% fps improvement at 1080p, Ultra settings, and fans of "Yakuza Zero" will see a 154% performance increase (which Yakuza Zero" fans will welcome the 154% performance increase (also at 1080p ultra graphics).

The biggest speed jump, however, is in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. As with all the game performance gains listed in the driver notes, this is at 1080p at maximum quality settings. According to Intel, frames per second have been improved by up to 750%. No, this is not a typo.

I want you to read those numbers again: that's an average improvement of 750%. The first thing that came to my mind was how terrible the performance of the previous driver had to be to get such an improvement. Unfortunately, with only one Arc card in the office and no overnight access to a proper test machine that would allow a thorough re-test (many of us work remotely), I could not check it myself.

However, a quick look at YouTube, especially the tests done by Abe's Mission Control, told me everything I needed to know. They ran "Halo" at the "Enhanced" graphics setting of 1440p, which is not exactly what is described in Intel's notes. Still, the frame rate was absolutely abysmal.

Not only did the game run at an average of 15 fps, but GPU utilization hovered around 13%. At the performance graphics setting, the average frame rate jumped to 50 fps and GPU utilization was around 40%.

If you want a technical explanation of exactly why Intel's Arc GPUs perform so differently, I recommend going to Chips and Cheese. Their consensus is that Alchemist is great when the chip's demands for cache and compute power are high, but struggles when they are not.

And that is exactly what is happening with older DirectX 11 games and modern games that don't go overboard with rendering technology. Intel's driver team, as seen in every software update since Arc's launch, has It will alleviate some of them, but ultimately, the new architecture will only improve the situation.

For Arc graphics cards, it's Battlemage, generally expected to arrive sometime in 2024; it seems a bit odd to root for Intel, which is underdog in the GPU market, but we look forward to seeing what improvements will be made. In the meantime, if you have an Arc GPU and would like to check out these performance boosts for yourself, you can get the new beta drivers here.